In an era where firms face rapid technological and societal changes, the field of strategic management must continually evolve to cater to contemporary challenges. Foundational scholars, Professors David Teece, Daniel Levinthal and Constance Helfat, offer insights into this necessary evolution. Teece, influenced by his interactions with Silicon Valley, has enriched our understanding of dynamic capabilities and the intricacies of competitive advantage. Levinthal, a key figure in organizational learning, search and adaptation, provides tools for comprehending the intricacies of organizational learning, spanning areas from technological shifts to intra-organizational dynamics. Helfat illuminates the firm’s capacity to change, emphasizing dynamic capabilities and the essential role of managers as capability micro-foundations. A recurring theme across their works is the importance of intellectual cross-pollination and tackling fundamental, big-picture issues. Their collective insights emphasize the importance of adaptability, innovation and a deep understanding of the evolving landscape, ensuring the continued relevance and impact of strategic management.

This paper argues for a capabilities-based, forward-looking approach to merger control that reflects the realities of dynamic competition. In fast-evolving sectors, the most significant competitive threats often come not from current rivals but from de novo firms or adjacent firms developing complementary technologies or capabilities. Conventional antitrust tools — rooted in static market shares and product overlaps — fail to detect these latent challengers or assess the innovation potential of mergers. We draw on economic theory, executive insight, and case studies (Meta–Giphy, Adobe–Figma, Amazon–iRobot) to show how competitive uncertainty disciplines incumbents and how mergers can either suppress or amplify that dynamic. We propose a framework that shifts the focus from products to capabilities: assessing technological assets, organizational routines, and innovation trajectories. This approach reduces enforcement errors — both false positives and false negatives — and enables regulators to protect long-term rivalry without undermining legitimate adaptation to new technology and market shifts By recognizing unseen competition as a structural feature of dynamic markets, and by evaluating mergers through the lens of capabilities, agencies can better align merger control with the goal of promoting sustained innovation and longer-term consumer welfare.

In times of deep uncertainty, the 'entrepreneurial university' needs to be able to transform itself, when necessary, to maintain long-term evolutionary fitness. Dynamic Universities explores how strategic, entrepreneurial leadership can help US higher education institutions thrive amid unprecedented challenges. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities framework, David J. Teece and Sohvi Heaton provide a strategic roadmap to help university leaders identify emerging opportunities and threats, take decisive action, and sustain competitiveness by enhancing, safeguarding, and reconfiguring key institutional assets – ultimately driving long-term transformation and success. Through compelling case studies – including Stanford and Berkeley – and interviews with global university leaders, this book offers practical insights into managing complexity, fostering innovation, and building resilient academic ecosystems. It is essential reading for administrators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of higher education.

Purpose The study reconstructs the historical evolution of research on dynamic capabilities (DCs), perhaps the most influential framework in contemporary strategic management for explaining how firms achieve and sustain competitive advantage. By examining its development over nearly three decades, the study aims to explain how recurring theoretical and practical challenges shaped the framework’s evolution and growing centrality within strategic-management research. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a Historical Literature Review of 140 articles published between 1997 and 2026 in leading management and organization journals. The analysis combines systematic corpus construction, bibliometric structuring, reflexive thematic analysis and historical periodization to reconstruct the field’s evolution and identify major turning points. Findings DCs research evolved through five historical phases. Each phase emerged from the interaction between shifts in strategic-management thinking, changes in firms’ competitive environments, and unresolved questions within the DCs literature itself. Across these phases, the framework progressively expanded from an emphasis on resource reconfiguration toward a broader conception of strategic orchestration encompassing managerial capabilities, organizational renewal, ecosystem governance and environmental shaping. As this expansion unfolded, five persistent tensions became increasingly central to understanding how DCs operate: stability versus flexibility, organizational mechanisms versus managerial agency, microfoundations versus contingency, architectural integration versus causal ambiguity, and adaptation versus shaping. Rather than being resolved, these tensions were repeatedly reframed as the framework evolved across new theoretical and empirical domains. Originality/value This study moves beyond existing reviews that primarily synthesize contemporary perspectives on DCs. By adopting a historical lens, it explains how the framework evolved, why its core debates emerged, and how they became constitutive of its current form. Building on this reconstruction, the study develops an integrative framework that reconceptualizes dynamic capabilities as mechanisms of strategic orchestration through which firms continuously navigate and rebalance persistent strategic tensions while pursuing competitive advantage under conditions of ongoing change.

Abstract The Point by Wu advances a compelling framework for understanding algorithmic status inequality, demonstrating how computational beliefs and computational inequalities can interact to produce persistent status hierarchies within and across organizations. This Counterpoint accepts Wu's core observations while offering a complementary theoretical lens grounded in the dynamic capabilities framework and the economics of general‐purpose technologies. Where Wu emphasizes structural constraints that render algorithmic hierarchies resistant to isolated interventions, this Counterpoint highlights organizational agency, specifically, the sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities through which firms can detect, respond to, and potentially reshape algorithmic status dynamics. Rather than disputing Wu's diagnosis, this Counterpoint extends it by examining three complementary mechanisms: sensing capabilities (detecting status‐stratifying algorithmic effects), seizing capabilities (mobilizing resources toward more inclusive algorithmic development), and transforming capabilities (reconfiguring human‐algorithm relationships over time). These mechanisms work alongside the structural interventions Wu advocates rather than substituting for them. The dialogue between structural determinism and organizational agency in the context of algorithmic status inequality suggests a research agenda focused on the conditions under which dynamic capabilities are likely sufficient to overcome status‐stratifying structural forces, how institutions might democratize adaptive capabilities, and what governance arrangements best combine structural intervention with capability development.

Dynamic capabilities are foundational to competitive advantage, particularly in business environments characterized by deep uncertainty due to rapid technological change and geopolitical disturbances. Chinese firms are not just good imitators but also powerful innovators. Stereotypes must change, and American (and European) firms have much to learn from Chinese management: their speed of decision making, the commitment to innovation, and steadfast attachment to winning. Chinese government support should not be underestimated, and it has helped reinforce an ecosystem-building mentality of leading Chinese companies, which are emerging as more-than-a-match for many leading US tech firms. There are sobering lessons for Western executives and policy makers alike.

The emergence of digital platforms, business ecosystems, and artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the nature of multinational enterprise (MNE) activity and challenging established theories of international business. While internalization theory has provided a powerful explanation for the existence and boundaries of the MNE through its focus on market imperfections, transaction costs, and governance choices, its explanatory power is increasingly constrained in environments characterized by ecosystem-based value creation, distributed innovation, and technologically mediated forms of control. Building on earlier work by Pitelis and Teece, this paper advances orchestration theory as a broader framework for understanding the contemporary MNE. We argue that modern MNEs are best viewed not simply as organizations that internalize transactions, but as focal firms that orchestrate globally distributed systems of resources, capabilities, partners, and complementary assets. Orchestration encompasses the creation, co-creation, and capture of value through the deployment of dynamic capabilities and the management of complementarities and co-dependencies across organizational and national boundaries. The digital platform and AI era further reinforces the importance of orchestration as control increasingly derives from technological architectures, data flows, ecosystem positioning, and access to critical complementary assets rather than ownership alone. By integrating insights from internalization theory, dynamic capabilities, and ecosystem research, the paper proposes a reconceptualization of the MNE that better reflects the realities of contemporary international business and provides a foundation for future theoretical development.

The thesis advanced here is that today the competitive advantage of the enterprise in most industries is rooted in the ability to motivate experts to create knowledge, help build organizational capabilities, and help shape strategy. If combined with good intellectual property protection, control over specialized assets, and a good business model, collective efforts at knowledge creation and renewal can help the enterprise build durable competitive advantage over rival firms.

• This article discusses that static models in merger control are insufficient in the sense that they are not able to address the unpredictable and non-linear nature of innovation. • Competition authorities often accept speculative innovation theories of harm while dismissing innovation defenses. • A more neutral starting point in treating innovation is required by a fact-intensive, case-by-case analysis that incorporates dynamic efficiencies, spillover effects, and the long-term benefits of innovation. • Finally, this article calls for a paradigm shift, moving away from static tools to a multidisciplinary methodology that ensures merger control fosters innovation and supports long-term welfare.

Paul David's death on January 22, 2023, marked the end of an era, but not the end of his lasting influence. An economic historian who pushed the boundaries of that field and several others, Paul made pathbreaking contributions in macroeconomics and growth accounting, historical demography, migration, natural resources, slavery, standardization, institutions governing knowledge generation and other topics. For readers of this journal, probably the most salient parts of Paul's research were in technological innovation and diffusion, path dependence, and the historical origins of Western institutions of science and technology. The range of topics is awe-inspiring. Yet Paul saw connections and even an essential unity to virtually all of this work. His deeper message was and continues to be that a better understanding of history and historical processes can help us to cope with contemporary problems and policies.

Physical goods producers routinely collaborate with digital platforms to extend their distribution capabilities. They usually realize that digital platform firms differ from them in their strategies and capabilities, and that significant opportunities arise from innovating digital platforms being able to collect, analyze, and leverage behavioral customer data related to the consumption experience. However, collaborating with digital platforms is likely to put competitive pressure on the incumbent’s margins, and, in extremis, encourage entry by the platform into the incumbent’s business. These threats can be moderated by limiting access to the incumbent’s technology and supply chain, or by building an in-house digital platform.

Open innovation involves some of the most strategic functions of the enterprise, and yet relatively little has been written about how it fits into a larger strategic management framework. This article fills that gap by relating open innovation to the dynamic capabilities framework and begins by briefly summarizing the two perspectives. It then reviews the modest theoretical and empirical literature that looks at open innovation from a capabilities perspective. It identifies where open innovation fits into the dynamic capabilities framework and explores how treating open innovation as a separate construct can enrich a dynamic capabilities approach to the management of the enterprise. A case study of China's Haier then provides an example of these principles in practice.

Competition policy can help promote an economy's innovation potential. To advance this goal, a shift toward studying firm-level capabilities is essential. Capabilities offer a nuanced understanding of the endogeneity and heterogeneity of innovation, complementing mainstream competition economics. Just as competition policy has previously embraced new paradigms like game theory, behavioral economics, and multisided markets, it is now time for a process of disciplined heterodoxy towards business & management science.

The dynamic capabilities framework outlines the means by which the managers of business enterprises foster and exercise organizational and technological capabilities and business strategy to address current and anticipated market and geopolitical conditions. In a firm with strong dynamic capabilities, managers can establish and periodically renew the competitive advantage of the business enterprise by not just responding to but shaping the business environment. This Element relates the dynamic capabilities framework to important concepts from the business and economics literature, demonstrating how it applies to today's business challenges. It also offers a capabilities perspective on a theory of the firm. Most existing theories of the firm caricature today's business enterprise. For advanced students of business, this Element provides a deeper understanding of the dynamic capabilities framework. For managers and boards, it shows how the analytical tools and mindsets that help to make their firms future-ready can be better understood in terms of the dynamic capabilities framework. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Heller introduced the "anticommons" concept in the late 1990s, based on Hardin's earlier "commons" concept, to refer to the situation in which numerous entities control the rights to use some asset or related cluster of assets. Heller and Rosenberg argued that, in such situations, users would need permission from multiple rights holders in order to use the asset(s), and that the difficulties of coordination would lead to inefficient underuse, leading to what they termed the "tragedy of the anticommons." This Article addresses the limitations of the "tragedy of the anticommons" arguments in the context of licensing of patents related to some industry standard for which the patent holders have committed to license their patents on "fair, reasonable and nondiscriminiatory" ("FRAND") licensing terms. This Article identifies several real-world examples where Heller and Eisenberg's prediction of underuse are not borne out in practice, and explain why real-world institutions that have emerged have largely solved the problem.

Seen as one of the key interdisciplinary “hot groups” in the history of research on historical, evolutionary, and behavioral perspectives on industry dynamics and management research, the milieu around Industrial and Corporate Change (ICC) reflects and shares emphasis on several of the themes of another influential hot group, the Carnegie School’s behavioral organization perspective, as well as shared roots with the intellectual environments around the SPRU group. We discuss some of the intellectual, institutional, and organizational forces that helped shape the early years and interdisciplinary vision and scope of ICC; the importance of the early enthusiasm and passion of both key members of ICC and the intellectual fields, and some of the enablers (and resistances) to the early interdisciplinary work.

This study introduces the concept of Dynamic Knowledge Management (DKM) by integrating Knowledge Management (KM) with the Dynamic Capabilities (DCs) framework to address strategic challenges in the digital economy. While traditional KM emphasizes efficiency and knowledge codification, it often lacks responsiveness to environmental turbulence. DKM reconfigures KM through the lens of DCs-sensing, seizing, and transforming-to keep knowledge processes aligned with evolving strategic objectives. We distinguish DKM from Ordinary KM (OKM) and develop a conceptual model showing how tighter KM-DCs integration enhances competitive advantage. Using a retrospective, longitudinal case study of Haier, we illustrate how KM can evolve from a support function into a strategic capability. Haier's transformation-from standardized knowledge routines to platform-based ecosystem orchestration-demonstrates how DKM enables continuous innovation and adaptation. This study contributes to both KM and DCs literature by identifying DKM as a new microfoundation that supports organizational agility. It also provides practical insights for managers seeking to align knowledge systems with the needs of strategy.